Some Sort of Genius

‘All hands shorten sail’ shouted Mortar.

There was a great hubub [sic] in which I had a good share.

‘Now boys lower the dinghy and Charlie do you think you could get in and steer, and have Brown, Donagan and Hayward in with you to row’ said Mortar.

‘Obey orders, sir’ said I.

The real force of the storm had abated, and [in] thick mist [only a] gusty wind made the sloop go. Now getting into the dinghy and rowing or sailing about was a very simple thing. We rowed away from the sloop into the darkness, and soon saw something black looming ahead.

So began ‘Good Times’, Percy Wyndham Lewis’s earliest surviving literary composition. Pencilled across 30 pages of lined paper in a tiny green and black covered exercise book, it was illustrated with childish drawings of figures in profile: schoolcapped boys carrying muskets, hatchets and cutlasses confront feathered savages armed with shields, spiked clubs and spears. Creatures of the son’s imagination, they were doubtless born out of the father’s stories of his epic redskin-threatened journey from Confederate prison to Union lines of 1864. The setting was a tropical island, familiar to readers of Defoe or Stevenson, although Campobello and the Isle of Wight would have figured in the child’s mind as well. And the action began aboard a sloop, the only type of vessel heard of at his father’s knee. Significantly, the young author of ‘Good Times’ divided his father’s two forenames between his narrator, ‘Charlie’, and the castaway explorer who organises the boys’ resistance against the cannibals: ‘Sir Edward More’.

In 1892 Charles was renting a place called Laurel Cottage at 7 West Street, in Ryde. Here he kept ‘a stack of dogs’, and elsewhere in the neighbourhood a shadowy female companion with whom he later confessed to have ‘lived as man and wife’ since the previous year. Anne may have been aware of this but still entertained hopes that some time her husband ‘would be willing to bury any old differences’ and that they ‘might have started afresh’. He held out no such hope and, for the time being, seemed content for their marriage to hang in limbo awaiting some event to trigger its collapse.

Meanwhile, he suspected ‘the old people’, his mother-in-law, Frances Prickett and Mrs Tompkins, were turning his son against him. This at least was his explanation for the boy’s behaviour in April 1892, when the ten-year-old came to Laurel Cottage for a holiday.

‘He sneers at me’, Charles complained, ‘and abuses Polly.’ Whether the object of the child’s abuse on this occasion was his father’s mistress or one of his dogs is not clear, but Percy was evidently enjoying himself. He pulled down half the branches of a laurel tree in the garden and Charles feared his landlord would come down on him for the damage. On another day the boy disappeared until 8 o’clock in the evening. Eventually his father had had enough and wrote to Anne demanding she take him back to Norwood where, he was inclined to think, the child was apt to behave himself better.

Nevertheless, before the boy’s pattern of mischief established itself, Charles had been well pleased with him. ‘He looks first-rate’, Anne was told, ‘brown as a berry.’ And one Tuesday, father and son stood companionably on the beach at Ryde, watching the big guns firing from the naval base at Portsmouth on the other side of the Solent. This spectacle provided the boy with a climax to his first attempt at literary narrative:

a thunderous roar, and a great shot come crashing through the building, and swept the natives away with it. Then roar after roar and shot after shot came crashing over the Island . . . We went on the beach and saw a cloud of smoke on the sea and the British ensign. We cheered, and we cheered and cheered.

But the ‘good times’ were all too fleeting that spring holiday and, leaving the mutilated laurel behind him, Percy was returned to his mother with an ominous judgement on his head:

Am greatly disappointed with the boy and have unpleasant misgivings regarding his future.

Charles gave up Laurel Cottage with the idea of moving to the East Sussex coast. However, finding everything too expensive, in December 1892 he rented another property in Ryde. Number 5, Partlands Avenue, known as Winchester Villa, was ‘very comfortable and a great improvement on Laurel Cottage’. He was ‘about out of funds’ and asked Anne to lend him £3 to tide him over until his $500 remittance from George arrived in January. On second thoughts, he told her, she ‘might send £5 to save sending more a few days later.’ She sent him the £5, which went on squaring tradesmen’s bills, ‘coal and things’, then came a request for £3 more by return of post. Husband’s letters to wife demanding money were a strange prefiguration of son’s letters to mother a decade later.

Charles had also been promised a lump sum of $5,000 by George, which he hoped would not affect his six-monthly remittance, and some of which he thought of sinking into a dairy and poultry farm.

He spent Christmas at Winchester Villa, on account, he said, of a sick dog, but he planned to visit Norwood during the first week of January in order to take Percy skating before the ice melted. This was in spite of the strain and embarrassment he now felt whenever he saw his wife.

His family in America had no inkling of their marital difficulties. When brother George and his wife Kate stopped off in London that March on their way back to Buffalo after wintering in the South of France, Charles, Anne and Percy presented an apparently united front to greet them. Only one thing puzzled George. Charles talked of putting aside $2,000 of his expected $5,000 in trust for Percy, as if making provision for an uncertain future. But when George mentioned the matter to Anne, the day before they left London, he was surprised to discover she knew nothing about it.

Charles accompanied George and Kate back to America for a brief visit. Meanwhile, Anne took Percy for a holiday at Winchester Villa in his absence. It is probable that the time they spent in one another’s company in London before Charles embarked was the last she ever saw of her husband.

Landing at New Jersey on 1 April, George and Kate continued by train to Buffalo while Charles stayed for most of the month with his younger sister Mary’s family at Edgewater, Bergen County, on a high bank over the Hudson River nearly opposite Central Park. He behaved scandalously. ‘Charley went off with [Mary’s] house maid a pretty English girl’, George reported later. ‘Mary of course was grieved and astonished.’

The brief dalliance cannot have been of much importance to Charles, because he left it behind when he sailed for Southampton at the beginning of May. But, casual though the affair had been, it served him as a pretext to broaden the rift with Anne and make a bid for freedom. He began, a week after his return to Ryde, with a confession apparently pre-empted by word from his scandalised sister in New Jersey. ‘I must admit (as you seem already to have found out) that I have misconducted myself with another woman – you know who.’ The first letter he wrote to her on Monday 15 May bluntly hammered home the irretrievable ruin of their marriage. ‘You and I can never by any possible chance come together again’, he told her. He would have liked to visit Percy in Norwood on his way home from New Jersey: ‘but it has come to such a pass that to see him I must subject myself to the embarrassment of seeing you too and our relations have been so strained [in] late years as to have culminated in a situation painful alike to you and to me.’

Her husband’s affair with a housemaid did not come as a complete surprise to Anne. She was already aware of the longer-established liaison at Ryde, and Charles reminded her of that as he pressed his case further. ‘It is useless to deny it longer especially as the old relation is still maintained and will continue to the end. She and I have lived as man and wife for going on two years.’ He concluded his letter: ‘you will no doubt be happier so far as I am concerned to put me where I deserve to be out of your mind and life.’ And he signed it: ‘Yours unfaithfully.’

As if the business could not be settled in one letter, he wrote her a second on the same day. Having outlined the problem in the morning, as it were, he proposed a solution in the afternoon:

As man and wife intercourse has long ceased between us. To go on so with a tie that galls each one to the bone is intolerable – Scrap it! You have a good substantial ground for divorce: cruelty, neglect, desertion – adultery. Let us be free once more.

Curiously, in this second letter he seemed to forget the woman referred to earlier in the day, with whom he had ‘lived as man and wife for going on two years’. Instead he appeared to be demanding his freedom so as to be able to marry someone else entirely. And if Annie refused to divorce him he would proceed with his plans regardless. ‘If . . . it be your intention to keep me in chains I will go back to America where I am unknown and probably marry if I can a good and conscientious woman as I require that companionship.’ With this consummate piece of emotional blackmail he placed his fate entirely in her hands. ‘There is but one way to save me from the pains and penalties of adultery, perchance bigamy. You know what that is.’

With steely control and a fluency testifying to months if not years of mental rehearsal, she replied by return of post. She told him of the pain his letters had caused her, admitted that some of the fault lay with her but at the same time professed to have loved him ‘fondly and devotedly’ and would have continued loving him had she been treated with consideration. She then made it clear that she intended to devote herself singlemindedly to her son:

I will never get a divorce. I think so much of Percy and am so desirous of his wellbeing both now and in the future (in fact he is the only interest in life that I have) that I could not mar his youth so greatly as to have it ever said that his parents were divorced.

She sent a copy of this, with copies of her husband’s letters, to his brother George, who for as long as he could kept news of Charles’s behaviour from his immediate family. He wrote to Anne that Charles ‘seems to have become lost to all sense of duty or loyalty . . . He has forfeited my love and respect and I have no desire for intercourse with him.’ Sister ‘Tilly’ Chisholm in Oakville was of the same mind when she eventually found out: ‘About Charles, the less said the better perhaps. I cannot bear to think of his despicable conduct and hope I may never see him again.’

Charles soon left Ryde, moved north and took a small cottage in Bunbury Heath, Cheshire. George continued to send the remittance of $500 each January and July, ‘simply because he is my brother’, he explained. This allowed Charles to live in the idleness to which he was accustomed. He told George that he had a horse which he rode a great deal and that he was fairly comfortable. ‘But [he] bemoans his lonely fate’, George reported to Anne, ‘and being cut off from everyone. Mentioned his boy in particular and seemed to malign the fate he had brought upon himself.’ Stung by varying degrees of remorse, guilt, loneliness and self-pity, Charles tried to explain, if not excuse, his behaviour. ‘I can’t quite understand what could have come over me . . . to bring matters to such a pass, but I had been boozing a good deal and got in a wrong way.’

Meanwhile George promised to provide for his sister-in-law. ‘As for yourself’, he assured her, ‘don’t be uneasy. I will send you £100 a year for the present and will always be your good friend.’ He gave her advice about the sale of her mother’s boarding house business and a profitable investment of the proceeds. Acting as her agent he invested the bulk of the £1,200 she sent him in property and land at interest of 6 per cent, and the residue with Bell, Lewis & Yates Mining at 5 per cent. George also gave advice when Anne later set herself up in the laundry business.

For part of 1894 she stayed at Winchester Villa, her husband’s former address in Ryde. This was the home address recorded by the County School in Bedford, where the 11-year-old Percy was now a boarder. Only one letter to his mother survives from this educational establishment, largely concerned with the ‘good time’ he was having. He was in the third form and hoped soon to be in the fourth. He had got an exeat to go into the town the day before ‘and fooled about the whole afternoon’. He had been forbidden a boat trip on the river because he could not swim but did not seem too unhappy about it. He wrote of his friends, the catalogue of names and assessments showing him to be a normal, happy, gregarious child: ‘Marshall is a nice chap, but a deuce of a prig. Waldram is all right . . . Jones is not a bad fellow, but a deuce of a fool. Thorpe sextus is an ass too. Mansell Jones is a fine fellow. So’s Boby [sic] Clarke, a chap of about sixteen, I work with. I say, there are a lot of big fellows in our form.’

In August his Uncle Albert, a Toronto lawyer, wrote to the boy, forwarding money from his father. Charles had evidently persuaded his brother to act as intermediary and a large part of Albert’s letter was concerned with impressing upon his nephew the desirability of his parents divorcing:

I do not intend to interfere between you and your mother or between her and your father – but should think if she looks at it from the pecuniary standpoint only, it would be worth more to her to make some arrangement with your father and sever the tie than to hold onto it and get little return while he lives and in the event of his death get nothing. I do not suppose there is any prospect of their coming together again – probably neither desires it or intends it . . . There is probably no love or affection lost on either side and all in all it seems to me to be reduced to a matter of dollars and cents.

Albert must have believed that at almost 12 years of age the child was old enough to form a judgement upon such matters. Despite its opening remarks the letter clearly encouraged the boy to side with his father. It must have been difficult for Percy to ignore the implications for his own future of the words that followed:

If . . . you run counter to [Charles’s] view, you will probably not get much assistance from him. In this case he may be and probably is a better judge than your mother – the mother does not always see things in these cases with the cool judgement of the father.

The letter concluded with an incidental and rather predictable piece of career advice: ‘Unless you have pre-eminent ability in art, I should think business the safer course to follow.’

Anne never divorced her husband and by October 1894 had settled with her mother in Ealing, North London. Part of the proceeds from the sale of ‘Ravenstone’ had enabled Mrs Prickett to buy a detached house: no. 8 Mount Avenue. Unlike most of the neighbouring properties, it did not have a name but Anne called it ‘Amherst’ in commemoration of her only son’s place of birth. Despite Percy’s ambition to graduate from the third form to the fourth at Bedford County School, his mother had him move closer to her new home. He was to board at Castle Hill School, about half a mile away from ‘Amherst’. His Aunt Tillie in Oakville marvelled that he did not seem homesick and thought the experience of boarding was the best thing for him. ‘It will teach him self reliance and application’, she declared, ‘and a bit of human nature as well.’ He arrived during the final term of 1894, and following the Christmas holiday he was much engrossed with the development of a new skill, wood carving, with the active encouragement of the School Principal. ‘Mr Morgan has given me permission to practice [sic] in the playground shed’, he reported to his mother.

Details of Charles’s life following the final break with Anne are few, but from hints dropped in his letters, a broad outline emerges. ‘I have without realising it soon enough,’ he wrote, ‘got myself entangled in a way that makes my extrication seem next to impossible.’ The woman with whom he was now living * had become pregnant, and some time towards the end of 1894 or at the beginning of 1895 she bore him a daughter: Ethel Evelyn.

By the time Ethel was three years old, ‘a most beautiful, intelligent and lovable little thing’, the woman who passed as Charles’s wife was ‘in many respects an invalid and her mental faculties greatly impaired’. One unguarded statement suggests that an actual wedding ceremony had taken place. ‘She thinks she is married to me’, he confided to Anne, ‘and in that respect I have deceived and wronged her grievously.’ This would not be the last time Charles Lewis was to commit bigamy.

Some time during the next four years, the unidentified woman who had borne his daughter probably died. When he left England in 1901 to settle permanently in America, Charles styled himself ‘widower’. He was 58 and accompanied by his seven-year-old daughter, and another young woman, of 23, called Lillian Natalie Phipps.

Wyndham Lewis’s final report from Castle Hill School, for the term ending 17 December 1896, ranged from ‘Fair’ in Scripture and Algebra, to ‘Very Fair’ in Arithmetic, English History, Geography, Mapping and Latin, to ‘Good’ in English Grammar, Parsing, Analysis and Euclid, to ‘Very Good’ in Spelling, Punctuation and Writing. For French he received 27 marks out of 100 but he was pronounced ‘stronger than the mark would imply’. Art was not among the 12 listed disciplines. His conduct was described as ‘very good on the whole’.

It is not certain where the money came from to continue his education, from his mother or from the erratic contributions made by his wayward father, but in January 1897, having just turned 14, Lewis entered Mr George Stallard’s House at Rugby School. At first he appeared to take a full part in the hearty activities of the place. During his first term he played the school’s particular species of football for his house four times. By March, ‘footer’ was finished, he reported, and ‘brookjumping’ had commenced. And he was eager for his mother to come to the Sports. ‘I have got in a fairly high running set’, he told her. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, visited on 3 March to give a lecture about his expedition to the North Pole and Lewis was clearly proud that the proceedings had been reported in the press. ‘I was there’, he told his mother.

But his passage through the school was not academically remarkable. Records show he was placed in the second lowest form, where he remained for the next four terms. He moved up a form in the fifth term, up one more in the term following, and then left.

He appeared in two House photographs. The first, in the summer of ’97, shows a group of 50-odd boys and young men, standing, sitting and crosslegged in front of a Tudor arched door. The bearded Stallard sits in the middle. Lewis is towards the back and on the outer edge of the closely packed mass of faces. His dark-haired, handsome and unsmiling features are partly obscured by the head of a boy wearing a particularly ill-fitting jacket in front of him. A year later he had moved from the Lower Middle to the Upper Middle School, exchanged the broad Eton shirt collar for a stiff, jaw-chafing stand collar, but was otherwise little changed. The face was, perhaps, slightly less full. He still did not smile.

In retrospect, Lewis was to take pride in his undistinguished academic showing at Rugby, in the punishment he claims was meted out to him and in the stoicism with which he bore it:

Scarcely did I learn how to spell, certainly. Masters, noticing this, and pretending it was my fault, took advantage of the fact to beat me unmercifully. They gave me a note to hand to my Housemaster. When he read it he beat me too. But I understood it was their fun, and being quite healthy didn’t mind.

This account is untrustworthy in one respect, however. Lewis’s spelling, punctuation and writing had been deemed ‘Very Good’ in his previous school, earning him 90 marks out of a possible 100, and the letters he wrote home to his mother from Rugby confirm that assessment. Good spelling is not an accomplishment that can be lost so easily in changing schools. If he was beaten it would have been as a result of other misdemeanours, and his summary of the time at Rugby, ‘two years of kicking balls and being beaten for neglect of work’, was probably nearer the mark.

Even so, it may be that he received fewer beatings than he claimed and that the image of himself as reprobate and rebel, even at that early age, was one that he carefully fostered in later life. He certainly expressed a schoolboy’s admiration for the notable miscreants among his contemporaries. He wrote in great excitement to his mother about a boy who was ‘bunked’ – expelled – for stealing from a shop in the town. He also described to her the ritualised fate of another boy who had suffered “a ‘sixth licking”’. This was a beating from every ‘sixth’ or prefect in the House. He explained that it was only the second time this awesome punishment had been given since the House was founded. But in conversation nearly 50 years later, Lewis altered the story in two fundamental respects. Firstly, he conferred the historic notoriety upon himself, and secondly, changed the nature of the ordeal to improve his story. Marshall McLuhan recalled hearing the enhanced version:

He . . . was very proud of being the only Rugby man until his time who had ever been given the ‘sixth licking’ – six full-scale lashings by a prefect in one day. When he had achieved his fifth licking, and having no wish to forgo the distinction of the sixth, he at once proceeded to the prefect’s door, with tennis racket and ball, and began to bounce the ball vigorously against the prefect’s door.

On 1 October 1897, at his home in Buffalo, George Lewis experienced a sharp pain in his chest on sitting down to dinner. His doctor was called but by the time he arrived the pain had abated. Late the same night the pain returned and the doctor was called again. While awaiting his arrival, George sat down in an armchair, and in the early hours of 2 October he died. He was 57 years old and he left to his heirs a large and complicated estate, of whose full value nobody seemed quite sure. George had made his will five years before, whilst preparing to visit Europe and before Charles abandoned his wife and son. As a result, no mention was made of Anne. ‘I feel sure he intended providing for you and doing less for Charley’, Tilly told her. ‘As it is, Charley will come in to quite a large sum . . . I hope [he] will do the fair thing to you and Percy but he is such a queer character it is hard to tell.’

Charles’s share of his brother’s estate was to be 14 per cent, a sum Albert Lewis estimated variously at $67,000, then at a more realistic $56,000. When he wrote to Anne in the immediate aftermath of George’s death, and cheered by the higher of Albert’s estimates, Charles was generous with his promises. ‘Whatever it be, you shall have half, you and Percy, and all to go to Percy on my death excepting a certain sum sufficient for my child [Ethel] here to live respectably and get a fair education.’

But even Albert’s lower estimate of what constituted a 14 per cent share turned out to be over-optimistic. And Charles was dismayed to discover that the executors of his brother’s estate insisted upon counting the six-monthly remittances paid him over the years as advances on his inheritance. It was calculated that since January 1889 he had received a total of $9,000. By the end of 1899, two years after George’s death, the sum of only $21,000 was being mentioned by Albert as his brother’s probable share.

Lewis’s school holidays were spent with his mother at resorts on the south and east coasts. One year they stayed at Weymouth in Dorset, the next was spent strolling the flat grey wastes of shingle at Southwold in Suffolk, where Anne had rented a cottage. Nearly half a century later Lewis remembered Walberswick, the adjacent town, and recommended a pleasant walk along a dyke there to T. S. Eliot. Mother and son also visited Paris for ‘some weeks every year’, but he left only one brief account of the first impressions made on him by that city:

It was then I first frequented the galleries, the Louvre and Luxembourg. On several occasions we stayed I recall at a pension in the rue d’Alger, which was full of books – the library of George Augustus Sala, whose widow I think ran it.

The rue d’Alger is a sidestreet running between the rue de Rivoli and the rue St Honoré. If Sala’s widow ran a pension there it must have been some time after 1896, the year of the writer’s death, that Lewis and his mother stayed. Lewis confessed himself indifferent to the books, ‘but the unnumerable [sic] oil-paintings in the museums, in one big lazy blur of cupids, shipwrecks, madonnas and fat women, exercised a pleasurable mesmerism.’

Back at Rugby he painted in oils in his half of the tiny study he shared with another boy:

Instead of poring over my school books, there I would sit and copy an oil painting of a dog. I remember a very big boy opening the door of the study, putting his big red astonished face inside, gazing at me for a while (digesting what he saw – the palette on my thumb, the brush loaded with pigment in the act of dabbing) and then, laconic and contemptuous, remarking ‘You frightful Artist!’ closed the study door – and I could hear his big slouching lazy steps going away down the passage to find some more normal company.

When the House Master discovered what was going on under his roof, Lewis was sent for and his sketches and paintings examined. Stallard, probably relieved to find the boy skilled at something, however lacking in academic rigour, arranged for him to have personal tuition from the drawing master. Thomas Mitchener Lindsay, an ‘old Scot, a beautiful silver moustache shading his red lips, gargled away . . . in a Glasgow accent, but gave [his pupil] much practice in the portrayal of plaster casts, and provided [him] with reports of unrestrained enthusiasm.’

Although he had moved up two forms to the Upper Middle School, halfway through the Michaelmas Term of 1897 his position in the new form of 28 boys was 28th. His mid-term report reflected this. ‘Is not doing much work’ was underlined. He was ‘very unpunctual’. His English was ‘not nearly his best’, also underlined. His Latin and French were ‘very weak’ and the words ‘makes little effort’ were underlined, as were ‘poor’ in Mathematics, ‘lazy’ and ‘not good’ in Physics and ‘very slow’ in Chemistry.

Only in Drawing was there a glimmer of promise. The initials V.F. – ‘Very Fair’ on a four-point scale of Good, Fair, Moderate and Bad – placed him just below ‘Good’. But even this fell somewhat short of the ‘reports of unrestrained enthusiasm’ Mr Lindsay was said to have given him.

His Tutor underlined that he was ‘very variable in Preparation’ and went on: ‘Sometimes works well, but often falls far short of being really industrious.’ His House Master said he was ‘thoroughly idle’ and underlined the words twice. ‘As bad a report as can well be imagined,’ pronounced his Head Master, not so much given to underlining as his colleagues, but no less emphatic in his phraseology: ‘He must work or go.’

Stallard had already written to Mrs Lewis, expressing the opinion that her son might be better placed at an educational institution where he could concentrate exclusively on the only activity he appeared to have a vocation for. At the age of 16 Lewis was enrolled at the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.

* This may have been the same woman he was involved with in Ryde. On the other hand it may have been someone else entirely.